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Wednesday, 26 February 2014

New Cheque Processing Fee

Back in Year 2012, I used to have a current account with a cheque book to pay for bills. Then IBG fee was reduced to 10 cent starting from May 2013 to encourage people to use electronic banking. Since then I settle most of my bills via Internet Banking. From 1st April 2014, there will be additional processing fee of RM 0.50 imposed on the issuer of cheque. This is another move to promote online banking.

Currently, there is an existing stamp duty of RM 0.15 per cheque leaf. For one cheque book with 50 cheques, you will need to pay RM 7.50 just for the stamp duty. Effective from 1st April 2014, you will need to bear the cost of RM 0.65 just to issue a cheque. This is definitely very costly if you issue many cheques per day.

In my opinion, this is a very good way to indirectly enforce people to use Internet Banking as 60.7% of Malaysia's population is already using the Internet. Of course, we still need to use cheque under certain circumstances, e.g. when the transaction amount is more than RM 10000.